Laddie: A True Blue Story

by Gene Stratton-Porter

The more I thought, the worse I got worked up, and I couldn't see how Shelley was to blame for anything at all. Love just came to her, like it came to Laddie. She would hardly have knelt down and beseeched the Lord to make her fall in love with a man she scarcely knew, and when she couldn't be sure what he was going to do about it—not the Lord, the man, I mean. You could see for yourself she wouldn't do that. I finished my work, and then I tried to do things for her, and she wouldn't let me. Mother told me to ask her to make Grace Greenwood the dress she had promised when I was so sick; so I took the Scotch plaid to her and reminded her, and she pushed me away and said: "Some time!"

I even got Grace, and showed Shelley the spills on her dress, and how badly she needed a new one, but she never looked, she said: "Oh bother! My head aches. Do let me be!"

Mother was listening. I could see her standing outside the door.

She motioned to me to come away, so I went to her and she was white as Shelley. She was sick too, she couldn't say a word for a minute, but after a while she kissed me, I could feel the quivers in her lips, and she said stifflike: "Never mind, she'll be better soon, then she will! Run play now!"

Sometimes I wandered around looking at things and living dully. I didn't try to study out anything, but I must have watched closer than I knew, for every single thing I saw then, over that whole farm, I can shut my eyes and see to-day; everything, from the old hawk tilting his tail to steer him in soaring, to a snake catching field mice in the grass, lichens on the fence, flowers, butterflies, every single thing. Mostly I sat to watch something that promised to become interesting, and before I knew it, I was back on the shame question. That's the most dreadful word in the dictionary. There's something about it that makes your face burn, only to have it in your mind.

Laddie said he never had met any man who knew the origin of more words than father. He could even tell every clip what nationality a man was from his name. Hundreds of time I have heard him say to stranger people, "From your name you'd be of Scotch extraction," or Irish, or whatever it was, and every time the person he was talking with would say, "Yes." Some day away out in the field, alone, I thought I would ask him what people first used the word "shame," and just exactly what it did mean, and what the things were that you could do that would make the people who loved you until they would die for you, ashamed of you.

Thinking about that and planning out what it was that I wanted to know, gave me another idea. Why not ask her? She was the only one who knew what she had done away there in the city, alone among strangers; I wasn't sure whether all the music a girl could learn was worth letting her take the chances she would have to in a big city. From the way Laddie and father hated them, they were a poor place for men, and they must have been much worse for girls. Shelley knew, why not ask HER? Maybe I could coax her to tell me, and it would make my life much easier to know; and only think what was going on in father's and mother's heads and hearts, when I felt that way, and didn't even know what there was to be ashamed about. She wouldn't any more than slap me; and sick as she was, I made up my mind not to get angry at her, or ever to tell, if she did. I'd rather have her hit me when she was so sick than to have Sally beat me until she couldn't strike another lick, just because she was angry. But I forgave her that, and I was never going to think of it again—only I did.

Mother kept sending Leon to the post-office, and she met him at the gate half the time herself and fairly snatched the letters from his hands. Hum! She couldn't pull the wool over my eyes. I knew she hoped somehow, some way, there would be a big fat one with Paget, Legal Adviser, or whatever a Chicago lawyer puts on his envelopes. Jerry's just say: "Attorney at Law."

No letter ever came that had Paget in the corner, or anything happened that did Shelley any good. Far otherwise! Just before supper Leon came from Groveville one evening, and all of us could see at a glance that he had been crying like a baby. He had wiped up, and was trying to hold in, but he was killed, next. I nearly said, "Well, for heaven's sake, another!" when I saw him. He slammed down a big, long envelope, having printing on it, before father, and glared at it as if he wanted to tear it to smithereens, and he said: "If you want to know why it looks like that, I buried it under a stone once; but I had to go back, and then I threw it as far as I could send it, into Ditton's gully, but after a while I hunted it up again!"

Then he keeled over on the couch mother keeps for her in the dining-room, and sobbed until he looked like he'd come apart.